Einstein’s ‘Universal Force’ Letter to Lieserl Is Fake: The Evidence

The Truth Behind Einstein’s Letter on the ‘Universal Force’ of Love

Albert Einstein did not write the famous letter to his daughter Lieserl about love as the “universal force”. The Einstein Papers Project, the scholarly team that publishes his complete writings, has said plainly that the document is not his, and no copy exists in the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem or in the project’s collections. The letter first circulated online in English in 2015, attached to a back-story about donated family letters that does not match the real history. Below is what the letter claims, how the hoax was exposed, who Lieserl actually was, and how to spot similar fakes.

What the viral letter says

The text presents itself as a confession from an elderly Einstein to the daughter he barely knew. He supposedly asks her to keep his letters private for years or decades, until society is ready for what he is about to reveal. The revelation is that a single force, which science has failed to explain, includes and governs all the others. In the letter’s words: “This universal force is LOVE.”

It then describes love as light, gravity and power, claims that love explains everything and gives life meaning, and offers a playful rewrite of his most famous equation in which the energy to heal the world equals love multiplied by the speed of light squared. It ends with a hope for a “bomb of love” to destroy hatred and greed, an apology for not expressing his feelings sooner, and a sign-off as “your father”.

The sentiment is warm, and it is easy to see why people share it. The problem is the name at the bottom.

How the hoax was exposed

The story attached to the letter says Lieserl gave 1,400 of her father’s letters to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the late 1980s, with instructions to keep them sealed for two decades after his death. Writer Katharine Rose, who wanted to write about the letter for her blog All Things Good, went looking for it in the university’s online Einstein archive and in the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, and found nothing.

She then contacted Diana Kormos-Buchwald, professor of physics and history at Caltech and director of the Einstein Papers Project. The reply was direct: “This document is not by Einstein. The family letters donated to the Hebrew University - referred to in this rumor - were not given by Lieserl.” Kormos-Buchwald explained that the family letters actually came from Margot Einstein, Albert’s stepdaughter, and that many of them were published in Volume 10 of the Collected Papers in 2006 and later volumes, in date order.

The real letters are now easy to read. The Digital Einstein Papers, launched in December 2014, put thousands of documents online for free, and none of them contains this text.

Who was Lieserl Einstein?

Lieserl was the first child of Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić, born on 27 January 1902 in Novi Sad (then Újvidék, in Austria-Hungary), about a year before her parents married. Mileva returned to Switzerland without the baby, and Einstein may never have seen her.

Biographers did not even know she existed until 1986, when Einstein’s granddaughter Evelyn, daughter of Hans Albert Einstein, found a bundle of early letters between Albert and Mileva. They were published in English in 1992 as The Love Letters. The last known mention of Lieserl comes in a letter of 19 September 1903, in which Einstein worries that she has scarlet fever and asks how the child has been registered.

After that the record goes silent. Michele Zackheim, in her 1999 book Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, argued that the girl had a developmental disability and most likely died of scarlet fever in 1903. Robert Schulmann of the Einstein Papers Project has suggested she may have been adopted, possibly by a friend of Mileva’s. Either way, the idea that Lieserl lived to receive letters from an ageing Einstein, or later donated his papers, has no support in the evidence.

Five red flags in the letter

The wrong donor. The family papers came from Margot Einstein, not from Lieserl, whose fate after 1903 is unknown.
A made-up institution. Versions of the story credit a “Hebrew University’s Einstein Papers Project”. The Einstein Papers Project is based at Caltech; the Hebrew University holds the Albert Einstein Archives.
A late, single-language appearance. The letter surfaced online in 2015 in English only, decades after any sealed collection would have been opened and catalogued.
Bad physics. Swapping mass for love in E = mc² is poetry, not science. Einstein used metaphors, but he was careful about what his equations meant.
The wrong voice. His genuine family letters are chatty, practical and often wry. Grand pronouncements about a universal force that has been hidden from science do not match his style.

Why fake Einstein quotes spread so easily

Einstein is probably the most misquoted scientist in history. His name gives instant authority to an idea, and his real personality, playful, humane and interested in big questions, makes it easy to believe he said almost anything. Spiritual and self-help pages are especially fond of linking him to love, consciousness or energy, because a physicist’s endorsement seems to bridge science and feeling.

The poster above is a good example of how to check. Its line about great spirits and mediocre minds is reportedly from a 1940 letter Einstein wrote in support of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, which gives it a dated trail to follow. That is the difference: a real quote can be traced to a specific letter, article or interview, while the love letter leads nowhere.

A simple routine helps:

Search the exact words together with the name of a quote-checking site such as Quote Investigator, Wikiquote or Snopes.
Ask for a date and a document. “Einstein once said” is not a source.
For Einstein in particular, search the free Digital Einstein Papers.
Be most suspicious of quotes that fit today’s social-media style perfectly.

What Einstein really said about curiosity

The search for the letter’s origin ended up leading Katharine Rose to Einstein’s real correspondence with family, friends and colleagues, which turned out to be more interesting than the fake. That is the best lesson of the story: checking a claim often uncovers something better.

Einstein himself is a good guide here. He told the LIFE editor William Miller: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” This one is genuine: Miller’s article appeared on 2 May 1955, shortly after Einstein’s death, with the wording “its own reason for existence”.

Who wrote the love letter remains unknown. Its message can still mean something to readers, but it belongs to an anonymous author, not to the man who gave us relativity.

Sources: Wikipedia: Lieserl Einstein; Wikipedia: Mileva Marić; The Digital Einstein Papers; Quote Investigator; original investigation by Katharine Rose, All Things Good, via HuffPost.

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